Like any organization, GAO faces major management challenges in accomplishing our strategic goals and objectives.

With most of our resources devoted to staff salary and benefits, the area of human capital presents a major challenge. A significant percentage of our workforce is nearing retirement age while marketplace, demographic, economic, and technological changes indicate that competition for skilled workers will be greater in the future.

With our agency realigned to facilitate our work for the Congress and new legislative authority in hand to manage our workforce more effectively, we are pursuing several initiatives to strengthen our human capital. For example, we are recruiting diverse, high-caliber staff with the skills and abilities we need to achieve our strategic goals and objectives.

We will be putting into place a competency-based performance appraisal system and using the results of our staff knowledge and skills inventory to help us in workforce planning. We have also reestablished and are expanding training opportunities for our staff--from the senior executives to the new hires.

Another major management challenge is building an integrated and reliable information technology (IT) infrastructure that supports the achievement of our goals. We are conducting a comprehensive review to identify opportunities to increase our efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity.

We are mapping our business processes to our IT architecture and will link future IT investments to our business goals.

We plan to continue initiatives to increase our employees' productivity, maximize the use of technology, and enhance the Web-based knowledge-sharing applications on the desktop. We must also increase the security of our network.

For a more detailed discussion of GAO's major management challenges, please download the PDF of the full-length version of this report.

[ Contents  |  Introduction  |  C.G.'s Letter  |  FY 2000 ] [ FYs 2001 and 2002  |  Strategies and Challenges  |  Financial Information ]